where the two cultures meet

Computer Art

Harold Cohen (1 May 1928 – 27 April 2016) has died in San Diego California. He was the creator of AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously.

Cohen went to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, San Diego in 1968, but he was given the rank of professor and stayed on for nearly three decades, part of the time as chairman of the Visual Arts Department. In addition, he served as director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at University of California, San Diego from 1992 to 1998.

After his retirement from UCSD, he continued to work on AARON and produce new art.

Cohen’s work on AARON began in 1968 at the University of California, San Diego.[3] He initially wrote AARON in the C programming language but eventually converted to Lisp, citing that C was “too inflexible, too inexpressive, to deal with something as conceptually complex as colour.”